COMP 313
Space Time Spring 2015
Division I
Cross-listed ENGL 312 / AMST 326
This is not the current course catalog

Space Time explores conflicts over how these two dimensions were understood in the decades surrounding the 1969 landing on the Moon. For NASA and the government which supported it, the ability to fly men to outer space and return them safely was evidence for the power of a technocratic realism, in which time was linear, space homogenous, and stories ballistic in their trajectories. Simultaneously, however, Cold War geopolitics, rapid social change, and the creation of an electronic mass culture made such Newtonian realism seem an increasingly inadequate basis for representing the world. What kinds of language might prove able to express the experience of time, space, and speed opened up by a flight to the Moon? Works studied will likely include Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow; Wolfe, The Right Stuff; Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon; as well as films, memoirs, and readings in cultural history and language theory.